Mr. John McGrane:

To take the macro point, the best circular economy is local community. I refer to the natural circularity of a town in Tipperary or Cavan, for example. If local employers, retailers, manufacturers or whomever can make it through the crises of the moment, they will be key to sustaining the fabric of that circular economy. They pay the wages, and those wages get spent in local shops and petrol stations. Some of the money goes to the Exchequer for the wider social good, etc. This is the opportunity now. You only have to look at our nearest neighbour to understand how bad things can become and what bad looks like. Outside of the greater London and the south east, England is in a poor state. It is paying a heavy economic and political price.

We, as a State and as a people, have choices to make at this point of our evolution. It is not accidental; it is conscious. It is about what happens if we do not make a decisive choice in favour of the regional economy or community and redeveloping towns like Clonmel, looking at west Limerick and asking do we care about this or not. Because it is a choice. We could say that it not important and that we will just go wholly urban from now on. That is what a number of other countries have done, with disastrous political and community impacts. We are in a brilliant place right now for us to take the opportunity. We have done a very smart thing budget-wise this time around. We have argued for years about the hazard to the national economy of depending so much on taxes from just a handful of FDI companies. Now, however, we have put some money into the piggy bank and probably just in time in light of the hardships that are coming down the line and the change that is happening with the FDI firms. We should stand back and instead of chopping trees all the time, take time to sharpen our axe and ask what country we want ten, 15 or 20 years from now. We can make that happen. It would not take long to implement. There is a need for a clock-speed issue to be resolved. I refer here to the speed at which we get the conversation going on the structures for national dialogue and the interactions with the LEEF, as an outmoded small club that is no longer representative at all of the wide majority of employment and job creation. We need to stand back and say that we know what to do but that we need to find ways of doing it faster, more democratically and with more engagement, and then we make the choices at national level about options that we have. Those in positions of power must lead. They must take the relevant insights and compare them against a template of what kind of country we want to be responsible for passing on to the next generation and to generations after that. They must make choices, just as Whitaker, Lemass and people of that era took dangerous political choices and delivered the wonderful outcomes that we enjoy today.